The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Ron Brown
the very existence of Canadian communities during the heyday of railway construction were determined by, more than any other single factor, the location of the railway station. During the boom years before the First World War, three national railways extended their tentacles across the largely unpopulated prairies, first choosing locations for their stations and then building the communities around them. In eastern Canada stations were thrust into the heart of existing communities, altering the urban fabric around them. Towns appeared, towns disappeared, towns were changed forever, all on the whim of a station planner.
Nowhere was this more evident than in western Canada. As part of its incentive to build the railway, the CPR had received 25 million acres from the government to dispose of in whatever manner it wished. One of the most lucrative ways was to carve it up into town lots. Each township received a station and a town.
The CPR’s townsite locations were meticulously chosen and rigorously executed. Before construction began, the CPR deliberately selected a southern rather than a northern route for its main line; the northern route would have had to pass through a number of existing settlements; the southern route was largely uninhabited and gave the CPR almost absolute control over townsite selection, design, and sales.
Although Sandford Fleming, the government engineer for its portion of the CPR, had devised a standard town plan for the prairies with streets radiating from the central railway station, the CPR ignored it and designed its own standard plans. Much simpler, the railway plan consisted of a grid pattern of streets, usually on the same side of the tracks as the station. The Canadian Northern located the towns on the north side of the tracks wherever possible. This would orient the station platform toward the southern winter sunshine, a direction that not only protected passengers from the cold northern winds but also helped heat the waiting room.
Although the routes of the railway lines were well known in advance, the locations of the townsites were not. To discourage the kind of land speculation that would drive up prices for station grounds, the railways left townsite selection until the last possible moment. More often than not, the railways avoided existing settlements and selected bald prairie for their stations and towns. Here they could control the location of the station and not only avoid high land values, but own the townsites outright and reap the bonanza from the sale of the town lots.
While this had the desired effect on speculators, it also caused considerable anguish among existing communities that the railways deliberately bypassed. In choosing undeveloped land at Portage la Prairie and Brandon for stations and towns, for example, the CPR shunned the established settlement of Grand Valley, and the settlement swiftly shrank.
The original CPR divisional station in Medicine Hat was typically simple in style. Its replacement was a more elaborate hotel/station. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A-175.
As the CPR began to construct its southern line through Manitoba, two busy little communities, Mountain City and Nelsonville, eagerly awaited the news that they would soon boast a new station and perhaps even become a divisional point. Nelsonville, in fact, was already incorporated and had a courthouse, a land titles office, a weekly newspaper, several industries and sixty houses. But, to their shock, the CPR ignored both and located its station between them at Morden. Despite pleas from even the provincial government, the CPR was unmoved. Beaten, the merchants and residents jacked up their stores and homes and moved them to Morden. Today no trace remains of the vanished villages.
Nakina, in remote northern Ontario, was one of the more dramatic examples of a town that had to move. Shortly after the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier completed the National Transcontinental across northern Ontario, a divisional town known as Grant was created. Here, the railway built a roundhouse and repair shops, as well as homes for engineers, conductors and crew. A short distance to the south lay another new transcontinental line, the Canadian Northern.
By 1923, a new Crown corporation known as the Canadian National Railway owned both. One of the CNR’s first fights was that to obtain the lucrative silk contracts from Japan. Success depended upon speed — speed to get the still-living silk to the east coast from the west before it started to deteriorate. But separate, both the former GTP and CNoR routes were too long. The CNR quickly realized that linking the two lines at their closest point, just west of Grant, would reduce the transcontinental travelling time by four hours — enough to win the coveted silk contracts.
The link was completed in 1923. The CNR then realized that its divisional point of Grant, now east of the busiest portion of the new line, was in the wrong place. At the new junction the CNR hurriedly dumped off a boxcar to serve as a station, gave it the name Thornton Junction, and prepared to move Grant to the new site.
Soon, a parade of houses and stores, balancing awkwardly on railway flatcars, began to slowly wend its way to the newly cleared townsite, now named Nakina. The townsite was a standard railway plan, a grid of streets situated north of the tracks with the main street leading straight to the station grounds. The company houses were reconstructed along the main street at the head of which a handsome divisional station replaced the boxcar. A string of false-fronted hotels and stores lined the street behind the station and gave Nakina the appearance of the boomtown that it was.
Radville’s main street with its preserved historic bank and hotel, ends at the Canadian Northern’s divisional station, now a museum. Photo by author.
Soon, the inevitable roads arrived, diesel replaced steam, and the railway pulled out. The old wooden station fell into disrepair. Now, thanks to an Ontario government grant, the station has been restored as a transportation hub, with VIA Rail’s transcontinental Canadian stopping three times weekly in each direction.
Occasionally the railways failed to dictate the shape of a town around their station. When the CPR sought to build the Crowsnest Pass line through Fort Macleod in southern Alberta, the Board of Railway Commissioners insisted that the railway build its station no farther than five hundred yards from the town limit. The railway, however, subsequently convinced the town to shuffle its boundaries so that the station still ended up about three kilometres from the commercial core and, no doubt, the more expensive land.
In 1945 a four-decade battle ended in victory for the business community of Port Moody, British Columbia, when the CPR finally hoisted its two-storey station onto flatcars and moved it from its fringe location to the heart of the community. The CPR’s crew completed the move in less than seven hours and even turned a blind eye when some of the more daring townsfolk hitched a ride on the slow-moving structure. In the late 1970s, the station was moved once again, this time to become a museum.
As in many prairie towns, the Moose Jaw station dominates the end of the main street. Photo by author.
In 1882, Lieutenant Governor Edgar Dewdney had been ordered by the federal government to find a new site for the territorial capital on the endless plains of Saskatchewan. At an insignificant siding known as “Pile O’ Bones,” Dewdney purchased land and pressed the government to place its new offices on it. Meanwhile, the CPR, in keeping with its policy of avoiding private lands, chose a station location three kilometres away. A new town began to bloom around the CPR facility and was given the name Regina. To further confound the hapless Dewdney, the CPR chose, to everyone’s surprise, not Regina, but the unlikely raw town of Moose Jaw as a new divisional point. Although Regina grew on the strength of its status as the capital and the fertility of its surrounding farmlands, it never became the railway town that Dewdney and Regina’s supporters had hoped it would.
The railways established their divisional points every 150 kilometres or so. Construction booms and soaring land values inevitably followed, and existing towns and landowners vied ferociously for the coveted stations and facilities. Fort Steele, British Columbia, began as a Royal North West Mounted Police outpost. But when the CPR began building its southern main line toward the Crowsnest Pass, rumours swept the town that the CPR had selected